While early wearable health monitors targeted fitness enthusiasts, the trend is moving into the nursery.

Courtesy of Rest Devices

The company’s flagship product is a baby sleep shirt outfitted with sensors.

Hardware startup Rest Devices Inc. has raised $1.3 million in new seed funding for its flagship product—a baby sleep shirt, or “onesie,” that comes equipped with sensors that record data about a baby’s position in bed, body temperature, levels of restlessness, and respiration as they sleep, then transmit that data to a parent’s or caretaker’s smartphone.

The chief executive and co-founder of Rest Devices, Dulcie Madden, says the product, called the Mimo, is a redesign of the baby monitor for the era of mobile apps, big data and wearable technology, and part of the “quantified parenting” movement.

Parents examine daily, weekly and longer-term reports about their baby’s well-being, sleep and development. They can also get custom alerts and notifications for anything that may give them cause to check the baby.

A 33-year-old mother of three in Lynnfield, Mass., Corrie Luongo, has been using the Mimo this year to monitor her youngest son, now 14 months old. She wanted to try the new technology “for peace of mind,” she said.

With her oldest daughter, now six years old, Ms. Luongo recalls waking up to piercing screams one night when the infant’s temperature rose to 105 degrees.

“We had to rush her to the emergency room. If I’d had a monitor warning me about this earlier I could have… stopped the fever before she got to that painful emergency state,” she said.

Because Rest Devices’ Mimo touches the baby’s torso, it can monitor breathing patterns and help prevent these fatalities by alerting parents if breathing has stopped for an abnormally long time. Other wearable monitors for infants, like one made by Sproutling, use an ankle-bracelet form.

Rest Devices has already struck an agreement with a prominent retailer, a U.S. chain that the company did not have permission to name, to sell the Mimo starting in January 2014 for a suggested retail price of $199. The Mimo kit includes three onesies and a base station that transmits data to a user’s smartphone.

The company has raised $1.3 million in seed funding, Venture Capital Dispatch has learned, led by The Experiment Fund and joined by Boston area angel investors including Koa Labs’ Andy Palmer, Nuland & Arshad Inc. and others. Earlier, Rest Devices raised $500,000 from angels.

A partner at the Experiment Fund, Hugo Van Vuuren, believes the company has the potential to bring parents “not just data…but also more hours of sleep each night.”

His firm invested, he says, in part because Rest Devices has “a very unique engineering pedigree,” with a founding staff of MIT engineers, and because “babies are big business.”

Given its new funding, the investor expects the company to scale its manufacturing and focus on building awareness and relationships with bloggers and brands that matter to parents of newborns in North America.

Rest Devices will also hire about 10 more electrical and software engineers, logistics and marketing experts in the next year, Ms. Madden said.

The startup currently employs six full time in Boston. It is in the midst of developing a new product, a “smart bottle warmer,” that will be able to tell parents exactly how much milk their babies have consumed at a given feeding, among other features.

Write to Lora Kolodny at lora.kolodny@wsj.com Follow her on Twitter at @lorakolodny

Comments (3 of 3)

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9:43 am November 22, 2013

Sleep Geek wrote:

Sorry but I think this is a horrible idea. Let's just disconnect ourselves more from being in tuned parents. This product will cause more harm then good. Babies will tell you what they need and if you are dependent on using products to determine what you child's needs are the structure of learning for both parents and child is critically damaged. It's a complete disconnect. Really? Smart bottle warmer? Why wouldn't we use our eyes and ears to know when our babies feeding needs are being met. Keep it simple folks babies are not that complicated. "real" peace of mind comes from understanding what your babies needs are, which are simply learned by their cues and making sure those needs are being met.

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